News and Updates

Archive for the ‘Community’ Category

Today we made an update to the way that account names that have been deactivated by the Garlic Necklace are displayed on the website. The Garlic Necklace is an item provided by Bloodlines that allows people to deactivate their accounts if they wish, so their avatar names no longer appear on the public site at slbloodlines.com. Every person who is under Garlic has been assigned an automatically-generated “secret identity” name, and this is the name that will appear in lists on the website such as soul and minion lists. So, deactivated accounts will no longer appear as “(name removed)” on the website, they will appear as the auto-generated secret name. The secret names will appear in “Firstname Lastname” format, and you can identify them because they will have one of the following five last names: Immortalus, Maleficus, Damarchus, Grimm, or Miasmador.

There are several purposes to this:

You can now specifically identify a soul you own that is from a deactivated account, and trade it with the Soul Reaper, or use it for ransom in an Electrum transfer. When selecting deactivated souls for transfer with the Soul Reaper or the Electrum, you can use either the legacy name format (such as “Lyle Maeterlinck” or “Firstname Resident”) or the secret name. When you’re transferring a deactivated soul, both the secret name and the legacy name will show up in the soul reaper messages, such as “Secret Name (Legacy Name)”.

We’ve heard that some people don’t like owning souls that show up as “(name removed)” on their profile. Also, it’s possible to obtain or trade for a soul that later gets deactivated, and some people have been disappointed by this. Now, deactivated souls will show up as the secret identity name, which looks the same as a legacy name on your profile.

Every account is assigned a single secret name only once. If you go in and out of garlic, the secret name remains the same, you don’t get a new secret name each time. If you own a soul that belongs to a deactivated account, you can view the legacy name of that soul by logging into slbloodlines.com and look at your own profile, then hover your mouse over the secret name, and you’ll see a tooltip with the legacy name displayed. To clarify this, ONLY the soul owner can see the tooltip with the legacy name of the deactivated account, and ONLY if they are logged into the website and looking at their own profile. Legacy names of deactivated accounts still will not be publicly displayed on the site. If you have any questions about this, please don’t hesitate to contact Lyle Maeterlinck directly.

Introducing a new game feature: Rarity! Every player in Bloodlines now has a new metric and meter displayed on their profile for how “rare” their character is. In general, the more you have done or achieved in Bloodlines, the more rare you are. There are five possible Rarity ratings: Common, Uncommon, Rare, Ultra-rare, and Legendary. You’ll also see the Rarity meter appear under each name in your soul list. Then, at the top of your soul list, you will see a new total of points that reflects the total rarity of the souls you own. Please note, this does not affect any other current stats or rankings, it is an entirely new stat that you can strive for. The new Soul Rarity stat ranking is under the stats section, and lists people not by the rarity of their own souls, but by the rarity point total of the souls that they own.

You can try to get the rarest collection of souls, and you can also strive to increase the rarity of your own soul by collecting items, getting achievements, and increasing your game status.

In addition, you will notice a new control on your profile editor that determines how your soul list is ordered. You can order it by rarity, or by newest souls at the top, or by oldest souls at the top. Once you set this ranking, your souls will be ordered that way for anyone who visits your profile, and you can change how they are ordered at any time.

We hope you have a great time building a collection of the rarest souls, and seeing if you can get to Legendary!

As part of our 7th Anniversary Event, we’re opening up another contest – to hunt for the soul of Lyle Maeterlinck!

There’s no purchase necessary to enter. Prizes include:

– Bloodlines Gift Cards

– A bite or claw from Mars Bracken or Lyle Maeterlinck

– A chance to win Lyle Maeterlinck’s soul

A representative from Bloodlines will be roaming the Second Life grid as a fresh unbitten Secret Avatar. We will choose certain people who hunt them as winners, who will receive a Gift Card and be able to exchange bites with Mars Bracken or Lyle Maeterlinck.

After all the weekly winners have been chosen, we’ll pick one at random to win Lyle’s soul.

How will we select the winning hunters each week? Spam biters will not be considered. We are looking to foster the spirit of true hunting – RP, conversation, seduction, diplomacy – these are the things we’ll be looking out for in a hunter.

We will announce who won, as well as the final winners of the souls, here on the Bloodlines Blog.

So get out into the grid and start hunting! Someone is going to own Lyle Maeterlinck’s soul – it might as well be you!

We’re excited to announce an official grid-wide Bloodlines Event – The Bloodlines 7th Anniversary Party! It’s been a fantastic 7 years, and we’d like to celebrate. The theme of this Anniversary event will be “Halloween In May”, because let’s be honest, Halloween really should come twice a year.

The event will start on May 1st 2015, and run for 1 week. During that week we’ll be connecting participating Haunts up via the website and the HUDs, so that you can easily travel from event to event, while discovering new Bloodlines-friendly locations. Mars, Lyle, and Noire will be visiting participating locations, and we hope to see you there!

For Haunt owners, this event means a chance to raise awareness of your clan land, club, bar or RP area! The Anniversary Event will provide an influx of new visitors, as well as give you a chance to network with other Bloodlines friendly locations. Players will be able to vote on their top 3 favorite Haunts they visited during the week, and the top 3 Haunts will get banners that will run on the Bloodlines homepage. Voting will start on May 1. During that time, all you need to do to vote is press the ‘Vote’ link next to the 7-year anniversary icon on the profile of participating haunts.

Getting involved is simple:

Location Owners – If you already have a Haunt, just log into your profile, Edit Haunts, and opt-in via the radio button for the 7th Anniversary Event. Make sure to use the Haunt Events calendar to schedule specific times for your events.

Bloodlines players – On May 1st, The 7th Anniversary Event will automatically generate locations in your HUD, under the Haunt button. We’ll also make it clear on the website which locations are participating, so you should be able to easily find the next great location to visit!

At the end of the week on May 6th, there we’ll wrap it up with an official party on the Bloodlines sims, so be sure to stop by. See you there, and thanks to everyone for making Bloodlines a vibrant RP community for 7 years running!

We’ve recently banned some accounts as a result of terms violations. There seems to be a lot of speculation going on, so we’d like to take a moment to review some of our standard policies, terms, and answer some questions surrounding bans and impartiality of Bloodlines leadership.

Terms of Service

If you’re at all confused about what’s ok and not ok in Bloodlines, the terms of service that you agree to when you wear your HUD is always available at slbloodlines.com/terms, which can be accessed from the footer of every page on this site. Please note that the terms state a requirement that users of Bloodlines products adhere to the general Second Life terms of service and community standards. Also note that the Bloodlines terms state that Bloodlines accounts can be terminated for the breach of any provision of the terms.

Impartiality

Here at Liquid Designs, we strive to remain impartial and to avoid even the appearance of partiality. We strive to give everyone the same level of service, and in our communications with Bloodlines members, what family they are a part of or how familiar we are with them is never considered. Honestly, we could not care less what family you’re in, we consider Bloodlines to be one big (somewhat crazy) family. We also don’t concern ourselves with the internal dramas between clans, packs, hordes, and guilds. We are focused on keeping the Bloodlines community thriving for everyone and designing new products and features.

Account Termination Policies & Privacy

Our policy is to only discuss account terminations with the account that was terminated, and with no other parties. If your account gets terminated, you wouldn’t want us announcing it to everyone and throwing an account termination party for you. So, please don’t ask us whether someone is, was, or is going to be terminated or why or for how long. That is simply between us and the person who was terminated. Also, we can’t ban people in response to petitions. We wouldn’t ban someone who had done nothing wrong just because everyone wants them banned, and we wouldn’t reverse a ban on an offender in response to popular opinion either. Account terminations are the result of the application of our routine policy, our terms of service, and our judgment that the termination is warranted.

Tinfoil Hats & Rumors

Sometimes, the tinfoil hats come out, and you hear some wild theories. These can be entertaining, but they’re usually nonsense. Misinformation, lies, and rumors are sometimes the tools that players use to keep others (including their own families) under control. You don’t have to tolerate someone who tries to manipulate you.

If someone tries to convince you of a conspiracy theory, we urge you to consider their motives for doing so, which may include:

A) making themselves look better

B) distracting you from something negative they’ve done

C) trying to ruin the game for you and others once it’s been ruined for them (“If I can’t win, no one can win! I’ll break the game!”)

To be clear, there has never been any manipulation of the game or “hacking” by the Bloodlines leadership, and there never will be. See our previous post about rumors. Misery loves company, and we advise you not to join it.

Don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions, and Happy Hunting!

There have always been rumors going around the Bloodlines community about various things, and the vast majority of you have learned not to believe everything you hear. However, we thought we might post this handy flowchart that you can use to determine whether a given rumor is true or false. In general, we recommend being skeptical about anything that you hear out there, and remember that the more shocking the rumor is, the greater the likelihood that it is false.

Now, here are a few things that are true:

We’re already working on making gacha machines with new custom texture packs for Series 5 tanks and prisms, Soul Reapers, Rampage Claws, and Spikes. The textures will be collectible and tradeable.We’re also planning on making some upgrades to our vendor system and affiliate vendors.

We’re going to be releasing a searchable listing of souls in the abyss, so you can find them and hunt them down!

We’re going to be releasing more information on the website so you can track activity on containers, including drinks, siphons, coffin / sarcophagus sends, transfers and sales.

There’s more news on the way, stay tuned to this blog for all official updates.

Many of you are now aware that Linden Labs has announced that they have begun to build a new virtual world. Understandably, some of you have expressed some apprehension about this new virtual world, and there have been a lot of questions about what place Bloodlines will have in it. Will Bloodlines exist in the new virtual world, and if so, will your current Bloodlines account carry over? These are questions we cannot possibly answer yet, as we know next to nothing about the new virtual world. The Next Web claims that a beta version is expected in 2015, with a 2016 launch. We would like to point out that these launch dates are probably extremely optimistic and aggressive, and that it is next to impossible to determine how long it will actually take to build something like this. So, regardless of what the situation is with the new virtual world, it is something you will not have to worry about for at least a couple of years.

We would like to correct a few misconceptions. It has been announced in various places that the new virtual world will not be compatible with Second Life, and what has actually been said is that it will not necessarily be compatible with Second Life, meaning it might be, it might not, but they’re not making any guarantees. They are just prioritizing the strength of the new virtual world over compatibility. That means some things might not be compatible. But, Ebbe Altberg has stated, ‘A lot of what you have will be possible to move across…’.

Regarding Bloodlines compatibility, there are many possibilities. It’s possible that Bloodlines will simply stay in Second Life only for as long as it exists, it’s possible that Bloodlines will span both virtual worlds, and that we will be able to transfer Bloodlines accounts over to accounts on the new world on request, it’s possible that we will make an entirely new game on the new platform, and it’s also possible that this new virtual world will never even be released. Right now, there just isn’t enough information to know what is going to happen.

We are dedicated to making sure the Bloodlines community keeps thriving and growing. Each of you are a part of the future of Bloodlines, and you make this community what it is. It just doesn’t make sense to make assumptions about the future of Bloodlines and Second Life based on a few slivers of information, and then base your investment in the community on those assumptions. No one knows what the future of Bloodlines will be, but that has always been the case. The real future of Bloodlines and of Second Life is up to each of us. Liquid Designs has every intention of continuing to invest time and resources in Second Life. We have lots of new updates coming out soon, including mesh prisms and cider barrels, and updates to the soul reaper and spike, and much more. We hope you will join us!

We receive many support requests regarding the Determined achievement, and I wanted to address some concerns with this achievement. For a while, we’ve been resetting this achievement for various people who requested it who believed that they didn’t miss a day logging in and that their achievement didn’t update correctly, and we’ve been resetting it for people on the honor system. But, because of the level of competition that has emerged for this achievement, and because of the volume of these requests we’re receiving, we are no longer able to reset this achievement on request. We have thoroughly tested this achievement, and we know that it is operating correctly, and it works for the vast majority of people.

How Determined Works

When you wear your HUD, the on_rez event in a script in your HUD sends a request to the Bloodlines system letting it know that you’ve worn your HUD. When the system receives this request, it will check your determined achievement, which records the date and time of the last time you wore your HUD. If the last time you wore your HUD was yesterday, it updates the time to today, and gives you a +1 on the achievement. If the date of the last wear is before yesterday, it will reset your achievement to 1 day. For example, today is May 2. If you wear your HUD today, the system will check and see if your determined date is May 1. If so, you will get +1. If it is April 30 or before, it will be reset to 1. The date cutoffs are in Second Life (US Pacific) time. In order to keep up with the achievement, you need to log in once during each Second Life day. You will need to pay attention to this if you are in a different time zone.

Here is an example of how being in a different time zone could cause you to miss a day on this achievement. Say you’re on GMT time (currently SL +7 hours), and you log in at 6am local time on April 30th, the system would record you as having logged in at 11pm on 4/29, which would be the current SL time/date. Then, you don’t log in again until May 1st at 6pm local time, the system sees you logging in on May 1 at 11AM SL time. Even though you have logged in once during two consecutive days local time, there were 36 hours between logins, and one entire SL day (April 30, which started at 7AM on 5/1 local time, and ended at 7AM on 5/2 local time) where the system did not receive a login from you.

There are also other things that can go wrong. If you attach your HUD in a no-script area, the signal will not be sent to our system, and your achievement will not be recorded. The signal will also not be sent f you are already wearing your HUD when you log in, and you log into a no-script area. There are also conceivably problems with the login signal being sent from the sim you’re on, due to lag, or other issues. This achievement also won’t work for you if you leave your avatar logged in all the time without logging in / out.

If you are competing for this achievement:

Make sure you are wearing the current version of the HUD. If you don’t have the current version, you will get a message telling you that an update is available when you wear your HUD.

Make sure that no more than 24 hours passes between times that you wear your HUD. You can stay logged into SL all the time, but you will need to reattach your HUD every 24 hours.

When you log in, make sure you see the message “You have been checked in with the Bloodlines system…” in your local chat window. If you don’t see this message, you were not checked in. You will have to detach and re-wear your HUD.

After you log in, look at your determined achievement, and make sure it counted up to where you expect it to be, +1 since yesterday. You might also want to check it before you log in, just to be sure of where it should be. You can view your achievements by going to your Bloodlines profile on the website and clicking on the link “View Progress” next to your achievements.